Ex-chef admits to stabbing wife to death

By Ken Ritter
Associated Press

POSTED: 11:52 p.m. HST, Jan 13, 2014

LAS VEGAS » An unemployed Las Vegas chef who turned himself in at a police station described in grim detail how he stabbed his wife to death in their apartment kitchen and said he'd do it again, according to an arrest report made public Monday.

Richard Magdayo Dahan, 40, was held at the Clark County jail without bail pending a court appearance this week on a first-degree murder charge in the recent slaying of his 28-year-old wife, Daisy Casalta Dahan.

Records didn't reflect whether Richard Dahan had a lawyer, and the Clark County public defender's office wasn't immediately assigned to his case.

Richard Dahan waited in the lobby of a police station before telling investigators that Daisy Dahan was sitting at the kitchen table when he attacked her with a serrated chef knife that got tangled in her hair. He said he hit his wife several times in the head with a meat cleaver and stabbed her torso with a filet knife.

"Richard said he felt that killing Daisy was the only thing left for him to do," investigators said in the police report. "He said he felt he had no other options."

"Richard said that if he was able to go back in time to the point where he took the first knife out of the dishwasher, he would kill Daisy again," investigators said.

Richard Dahan told police he was a kidney transplant recipient in failing health who lost his job as a chef at a Las Vegas Strip casino resort.

He said he and Daisy Dahan married in October 2011 in the Philippines, but that after she moved to Las Vegas they squabbled over money and his relationship with a former girlfriend with whom he has two children. He said she demanded a divorce, but he felt that was unacceptable because his parents stayed married until his father died.

Daisy Dahan was found Friday in the bloody kitchen with "massive" slash and stab wounds to the throat and abdomen, police said, and Richard Dahan had cuts on his hands and a broken finger.